


mice on venus

by TheBigCat



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alternate Universe – Modern, Complicated Parental Issues, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Families of Choice, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minecraft, Sad Ace Hours, Self-Loathing, and 'surrogate father figure', the doctor is that line, there is a thin line between ‘ex-physics teacher who helps you commit arson on the weekends’
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29735904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigCat/pseuds/TheBigCat
Summary: “...Thanks,” says Ace begrudgingly.“Any time,” comes the reply, slightly smug in the way that only the Doctor can be after emotionally manipulating her through the means of video game dragons.Or,Families arehard.Ace is coping. Sort of.
Relationships: Seventh Doctor & Ace McShane
Comments: 12
Kudos: 23





	mice on venus

**Author's Note:**

> Back in my pre-teen years, I’d often spend extensive amounts of time at my friend’s house, who was the one who first introduced me to Minecraft. Her father was one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, for various reasons. He had an affinity for jumping onto our Minecraft worlds unexpectedly and helping us out with whatever inane projects we were working on at the time. Hollowing out mountains or messing around with TNT or whatever it was that week. I think he must have been a computer programmer or an engineer or something, in retrospect, because he actually understood how redstone worked. I haven’t talked to that friend in nearly seven years now, and her dad probably doesn’t even remember me, but while messing around on a server earlier this year with copious amounts of explosives and a very large mountain (an impromptu New Year’s Eve party with friends. long live social distancing), I started thinking about those first few Minecraft games again. 
> 
> Maybe this is a stupid concept for a story, but god are there some emotions attached to this dumb block game and miserable childhoods. 
> 
> With that in mind. Here is approximately 8k of complete self-indulgence.

*

The headlights flare abruptly in her eyes, thoroughly dazzling her. The main reason that it’s a shock is because she’s been half-zoned out, scrolling through her old text messages and extensive photo roll on her phone for the last fifteen minutes – looking but not really seeing any of it. And these headlights are _stupidly_ bright.

“Ow,” Ace says flatly.

The headlights flicker off almost immediately, as if in immediate response. After another moment, the engine turns off.

“I almost didn’t see you,” says the Professor, tone far too light and conversational for her liking. “Are you all right down there?”

“Just peachy,” she groans. Her phone’s at sixteen percent. She stuffs it roughly into the first jacket pocket she can find, and struggles to her feet. Her back is stiff, her legs aren’t much better. Sitting on the curbside of a main road at nearly-midnight for nearly half an hour isn’t _anyone’s_ idea of a good time, let alone hers.

Bessie’s hood has been pulled up and over the top of the little yellow car, providing at least some shielding from the cool of the night and the faint mist creeping in all around them. But Bessie also doesn’t really have windows to speak of, or even _doors,_ as such, so it’s still pretty cold in there. Only slightly better than sitting on the curb. Ace climbs into the passenger seat, shivering as the past half-hour finally starts catching up to her, and sinks into the plush velvet seating.

Usually, she adores this car. It’s old-fashioned and flashy and has absurd amounts of _personality._ Apparently when it’s legal for her to do so, the Professor intends on teaching her to drive in Bessie. (She thinks this is hilarious, because of all the lines he could have chosen to draw regarding legality, this is his limit? _This?_ ) But today, all she feels is vaguely numb. She doesn’t want to be here, in Bessie. She doesn’t want to be at home. She doesn’t know where she wants to be.

“...Thanks,” she mutters, unwilling to look him in the eye. “For coming.”

“Of course,” he says. His tone is still entirely too light. It’s putting her on edge in a way she can’t place, not really. “Are you all right?”

“You asked me that already,” she tells him. 

“Ace,” he says, and now there’s a slight undertone of Legitimate Stress there that makes her start paying attention, makes her eyes flicker over in his direction. He’s barely visible in the shadows and dim chiaroscuro patterning of the street lights. “When you called me a quarter of an hour ago, it was eleven twenty-six, and you were barely responsive. Forgive me for prying, but given past experiences of this sort, I am quite worried about you.” His tone takes on a distinct edge of strain. “I am not asking because I want you to lie to me. I am asking because I _want to know if I need to take you to the emergency room.”_

A wave of cold steals over her that has nothing to do with the chill of the night. It’s something like dull panic. She’s aware that he’s dropping the mask on purpose; showing her this just _so_ he can get a truthful response from her. She also knows that nothing about this is remotely feigned. His manipulations have layers like this. It’s infuriating.

Ace kind of hates that it’s working.

“She threw a glass at me,” she tells him. Swallows. She hates being honest like this. “Glass of water. Um. More like a jug, really. I dodged.”

He nods. Keeps watching her.

“Look. I – I’m fine.” Her voice cracks a bit. Fuck. “I’m – cold, and there was a lot of yelling, and... well, obviously I got kicked out, which... which isn’t _amazing,_ but... you came.”

“I did,” the Professor says. He pats distractedly at her jacket sleeve, which, now that she thinks about it, is damp and cold and clinging uncomfortably to her skin. He frowns. “Would you consider taking that off?”

She thinks about it for a moment, and then shakes her head.

“All right,” he says easily, then swivels around to reach over and into the back seats. He tugs out several blankets that very much look like they’d just been thrown back there haphazardly, and piles them onto her lap.

She stares at them for a very long moment, and then slowly pulls the uppermost blanket around her shoulders. It’s patchwork; soft and worn. It feels well-made. She hopes she doesn’t look as small as she feels right now. This is already mortifying enough as it is. “Can we... hurry up and go?”

“If you’re sure there’s nothing else.”

“There’s not. Let’s go.” She casts a glance along the silent, darkened street. “Bessie’s kind of loud. I don’t – if she hears we’re out here – ”

“That might not be an entirely unwelcome turn of events. I should like to give your _mother_ a piece of my mind,” comes the somewhat dark response, and it’s half-muttered under his breath so she’s not absolutely sure if she was meant to hear it or not. But he turns the key in the ignition and Bessie’s engine roars and rumbles into life and almost immediately they’re speeding down the road at a breakneck pace that would normally have Ace whooping and hollering with delight. Tonight, she just bundles the blankets and quilts around her shoulders and watches the road as they turn off the end of her street and towards the A40.

He doesn’t talk, just hums absently to himself and taps his fingers in rhythms and abstract mix-metre patterns against the steering wheel. She doesn’t think he’s expecting her to talk, either, although she does get the impression that he wouldn’t mind if she did.

“So, I’m probably going to be staying over tonight?” says Ace after a few minutes of this, like she’s asking him it as a question and like it’s a thing that she’s just bringing up out of nowhere, with no preamble or buildup. Like she just didn’t run out of her house like the pathetic little coward she is at quarter-to-midnight. “If, um, that’s – ”

“Your room is always free,” he tells her. His eyes glint in the flickering of the passing streetlights. They’re almost shiny, but then he looks away, focusing on the road entirely. “Always – any time, any day of the year, any circumstances.”

Ace shifts, curls her legs under her. “So if I got arrested in Texas for dealing shitty hallucinogenic drugs to a load of grizzled Italian mobsters – ”

“I would drive directly through the Atlantic Ocean to bail you out, correct.”

It’s a joke, but one that still makes her throat tighten because of the absolute _sincerity_ it’s drenched in. She doesn’t deserve that kind of forthright, honest loyalty. Not after what she’s done tonight.

They’re on the highway for maybe five or ten minutes, and there’s not many cars out. The scorched-wet, midnight-cold smell of the night air and highway asphalt rises around them. The lights blur and streak. Bessie pulls off at an out-of-the-way, deeply familiar exit, and then they’re in the backstreets and the Professor is tapping his fingers distractedly against the steering wheel as he navigates through a familiar web of silent and still suburban houses. And it feels like hours and it feels like minutes when they finally pull up to the house on Allen Road and Ace releases a breath it feels a lot like she’s been holding in this entire time.

The gates creak open, and so do the garage doors, and soon enough they’re in the dusty, dimly-lit garage and it’s just. _Entirely_ too quiet. Ace doesn’t like the silence – no wind, no car engine, nothing. It’s chipping away at the comfortable numbness she’d settled into.

The Professor checks the hand brake; says, “No need to worry about waking Bernice up; she’s away this week.”

She nods. Her shoulders untense maybe just a fraction. “Okay,” she says.

“Some sort of last-minute archaeology dig, I’m led to believe. She seemed quite enthusiastic about it.”

“Yeah. All right.” 

The last thing she wants to do at this point is inconvenience anyone else, and the second-last thing she wants to do is explain any of this to Benny. Or anyone. But kind of especially Benny, who she loves, but her particular brand of sympathy just _grates_ at Ace sometimes; makes her hackles rise and her teeth itch. It’s not Benny’s fault, of course, Ace is just so massively fucked up at this point that any conventional forms of caring or affection put her on edge more effectively than any actual threat ever could.

When the Professor gets out of Bessie, so does she – swinging her legs out of the side of the car, planting her feet unsteadily on the cold stone of the garage floor. She hesitates briefly, unsure whether or not to leave the small mountain of blankets and quilts in the car, but the Professor says, “Bring them through; I need to wash them and dry them anyway.”

She nods, and bundles up as many as she can carry into her arms, and follows him almost mechanically out of the garage, around the driveway and up to the front porch.

He tries to unlock the front door, but after a moment it becomes apparent that it wasn’t actually locked in the first place. There’s a brief pause, and then he just opens it and walks in without saying a word, holding it open for her. She steps in past him, blankets still bundled in her arms and draped around her shoulders, and just. Stands there.

The entrance hallway is cold and dark and kind of eerie, especially with the mirror only a few feet down reflecting the dim light across onto the other wall. It doesn’t feel real. The Professor’s house is only real in the daytime, bathed in morning sunlight and afternoon coolness and the occasional blue laziness of an unexpected rainfall. It almost feels like someone else’s house, like this. Someone else’s house that they’re breaking into. That _she’s_ breaking into.

“I don’t really want to sleep,” she admits.

Behind her, the Professor flicks a switch. The hallway comes alight with dim golden warmth. It’s electric and she _knows_ it’s electric, but it feels an awful lot like candlelight anyway. It feels like...

It feels like midnight at the Professor’s house. Nothing more, nothing less.

“All right,” he says. “I wasn’t sleeping anyway. Come through, I’ll make you something to drink.”

It’s a lie. She’s tired, he’s tired; but apparently if she isn’t sleeping, he isn’t either. She sort of appreciates that.

The living room is more familiar. Projects everywhere, books heaped up and towering off on every available surface, a half-dissected motorcycle propped against one wall with a broken cello resting just next to it. He clears a pile of English Lit textbooks off one of the sofas with a decisive sweep of his hand and a series of faint heavy thuds.

He turns to her. “I can wash and dry your jacket,” he offers, looking faintly lost, like he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing with himself.

She doesn’t want to take it off. It’s stupid, but it feels sort of like it’s the last thing keeping her together at this point. “It’s got all my stuff in the pockets.”

“I’ve curbed my incessant kleptomaniacal tendencies, not to worry.” His tone is breezy, a bit clipped at the edges.

She lets out a light scoff. “I’m not worried about you stealing my shit, Professor.”

For once, he doesn’t berate her for her language choices. He just frowns ever-so-slightly, and says, “You’ll be warmer,” like she deserves that. Which – no. But with that tone of voice of his – a little sad, a little pleading... she feels even worse keeping her jacket on at this point. She slips it off reluctantly, and allows him to take it from her. She feels cold and lost and exposed without it, even when he drapes a blanket over her shoulders.

“What’s that thing where nothing feels real and it’s kind of like someone else is moving your body instead of you?” she wonders, somewhat numbly. “Pretty sure there’s a word for that. You mentioned it, I think. Sometime.”

The Professor pauses briefly in folding her jacket up, over his arm. “That would be dissociation.”

“Right,” says Ace, and then doesn’t say anything else. She’s too tired; too fizzing with nervous energy and adrenaline, too overwhelmed with numbness and anger and dull acceptance to really elaborate. It’s mostly numbness at this point. She barely even notices as he prods her gently into sitting down on the free couch-space he’d cleared off.

“We should talk,” he says.

She laughs, and it doesn’t feel right in her mouth. It’s not funny _._ It’s _not._ She doesn’t know why she’s laughing. The Doctor’s not laughing. She stops laughing.

“I’m going to get something hot and sweet for you to drink, first,” he decides, taking off his own overcoat and hanging it up on the coatrack, and then, “Are you hungry?”

“Not really,” she says honestly.

He nods, casts her a look that’s full of genuine, bubbling-over concern, then gathers her jacket and some of the excess blankets, bundling them under one arm – and leaves, heading in the general vicinity of the laundry room and/or kitchen.

She waits for him to get back, and distracts herself by unravelling a loose thread on the couch next to her, twisting it over and over and around her finger until she tugs too hard and it snaps, and then she unwinds the thread and begins twisting it in a messy web, between her fingers and her hands. A low-budget cat’s cradle.

And then the Professor’s back. She doesn’t know how long it’s been since he left, or how long he’s been in the room. He comes over. Wordlessly, he hands her a mug of hot chocolate. It’s in the stupid kitschy mug they’d found at some garage sale or other, the one with the radioactive warnings emblazoned all over it.

She doesn’t feel much like drinking it right now, but she does take a sip or two – it’s pretty good, all things considered – before setting it down on the coffee table.

“I know you’re not happy at home, but are you _safe?_ ” he asks. He’s kind of looming over her, in the way that only a five-foot-six, entirely unthreatening ex-physics teacher can. He’s giving it his best shot, that is. It’s a valiant attempt.

Ace scowls. “If I can just keep my stupid mouth shut – ”

“That’s not an answer.”

Silence, and then she shrugs. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

A moment of silence. He pulls an Unhappy Face at her. She pulls one right back.

“Still not up for sleeping?” he asks after another moment.

“Not really.” She avoids eye contact.

“Minecraft?” he asks.

“Fine,” she says.

“I’ll get the computers.”

“Fine,” she says, and watches him leave to do just that, wondering just what emotions she should be feeling right now.

*

He returns within minutes, and passes her the tiny chunky laptop she’s ended up claiming as her own whenever she’s over, with a corded mouse sitting on top. He sits cross-legged on the couch across from her with his own cobbled-together monster of a franken-computer resting on his lap. (She _knows_ Frankenstein’s the doctor, not the monster. It’s entirely applicable here. _He’s_ the mad scientist that’s brought this freak of machinery into being.)

She rests a hand on top of the laptop, and tries to think of what to say. She doesn’t feel like being antagonistic and angry anymore, but she feels like she’s broken something irretrievably and isn’t quite sure how to tiptoe around its shattered remains. She doesn’t know what to say if he’s not angry with her. And he’s probably not angry with her. Right?

“Research has shown that cooperative playing of video games can relieve stress and improve mental health,” he supplies, seemingly noticing her inner debate.

She has equally no idea how to react to that, and eventually settles on a noncommittal, “Don’t think my mum would agree with that.”

“We both know my opinions on your mother,” he says. “And I do believe _I’m_ the one with the doctorate here.”

“Sure you are, Professor,” she says, and opens the laptop. She hadn’t logged off last time she was here, so it’s still open to a compilation of MythBusters clips featuring Adam and Jamie blowing up things that were probably never meant to go up in flames quite so spectacularly. She bookmarks it for later; quits to desktop. “Our normal server?” she checks, even though it’s not really much of a question.

He shrugs, a casual little incline of his shoulders. “If you want.”

“I... yeah. That’d be cool.” She fumbles around, plugs the mouse in, and slides down to find a place to sit on the ground so she’s wedged in with her back resting against the couch and at the right height to put the laptop on the stained, slightly burnt coffee table. “Hah. Can’t even remember what we were doing last time.”

“Cursing loudly and creatively over hostile mobs, I believe.” He’s already typing busily, apparently setting the server up.

“Oh,” she says. “Right, I was gonna die horribly, then the internet cut out. Fun.” A moment passes. The game’s loaded properly now. She stares at the splash screen, which reads in bouncing, flashing yellow, _Ask your mother!_ It’s a bit too on-the-nose for her liking. “Can we – ”

“I’ve already set it to peaceful.”

“Cheers.” She flicks over to multiplayer; opens up their server. They’ve been playing on-and-off on it for a few months now. There’s another one they frequent; one where Hex and Mel and some of her other friends come on to mess around too, but Ace doesn’t really want to risk any of them being inexplicably online at midnight and asking her what the hell she’s doing awake right now. Right now, she just kind of wants to do something mindless and ultimately useless, in the big scheme of things. Like smelting glass to finally make a greenhouse or something, or set off an excessive amount of TNT somewhere flammable.

She connects, and finds that she’s in the middle of a dark, faintly-moonlit ravine. No monsters – the zombies and skeletons and creepers that she’d been frantically battling off nearly a week ago are gone, thanks to the Professor. Now all she needs to worry about is getting out and getting back to their shared house, she thinks. And then she nearly laughs. Not a happy laugh, either. Sure, getting out of a crevasse in a stupid cubist video game is _all she has to worry about._ If only.

Ace is dangerously close to thinking too hard about what’s happened tonight, so she shakes herself. Being stuck in a ravine in Minecraft may not be the most of her problems, but it’s a problem she can deal with right now. It’s almost a comforting thought. She sets out some torches, and sets about finding a way out.

“Hm,” says the Professor, to her left. He’s frowning at his own screen. “I do believe we might need to obtain more redstone. Our supplies are depleted to dangerously low levels.”

“Tragic,” says Ace. The Professor is the only person she knows who actually cares about redstone outside of the most basic uses of the stuff. It’s kind of hilarious how invested about building stuff with it. She sorts through her inventory. She has a map, but no water bucket. There _is_ a stack of wood that she’d been saving for later. She considers her options, and then just starts towering upwards to the top of the ravine. She’s to tired to find another way out. She can get more wood later. “I’ll get some if I see any. Need anything else?”

“String, gunpowder, as much iron as you can manage,” he promptly rattles off.

She’s reached the top. It’s some kind of savannah area up here, which means that she’s not too far from home. No monsters means she can take her time getting back. “Still working on the Big Project, huh,” she says, corner of her mouth twitching. 

“A true visionary’s work is never complete,” he proclaims, and they look up from their screens at the same time and make eye contact, and just like that, the thin layer of pretence threatens to crumble like rice paper.

Ace looks away hurriedly before it can, and focuses on what she’s doing. Getting back to home base. Right. She can sort of remember the way from here, but it’s been a while, and the late hour isn’t helping her memory any. She fiddles around with her inventory until her map’s at the bottom-left of the screen, turns around, and starts moving.

The trip isn’t too long, not really. And since there’s no monsters to worry about, it just consists of repetitive bouncing and holding down the control key and map-checking. Ace clicks and taps and thinks about her mother. She wonders what it’d be like to actually love her. Wonders what it’d be like to have a father. She imagines it’d be pretty much like dealing with mum, but probably with more follow-through on the whole physical violence thing. The thought is not appealing.

...She nearly runs right past their house, and has to turn around and double back.

They’d made an effort to make it look somewhat like Allen Road. Peaked roof with attic storage, rambling garden spreading out from the front, mysterious half-finished science projects out the back. The lights are warm and soft, spilling out in shaded patches several blocks around the building’s front gate. Near the entrance is one of the cats she’d tamed and jokingly named after one of her ex-girlfriends; to the left is the evidence of a long and involved debate/argument over appropriate crafting materials, conducted entirely via signs posted on the inner perimeter wall.

It’s so stupid. It’s just a dumb block video game. It shouldn’t make her heart squeeze and seize like this.

“Home sweet home,” she says aloud, by means of announcing her return, and heads into the house itself and up into the storage room to drop off the contents of her inventory. There really haven’t been many significant changes to the place, but from here she can see the Professor’s avatar, in the distance, bouncing from block to block as he works on the _monster_ of a construction project in the back yard.

See, the Doctor isn’t trying to reconstruct the entirety of Minecraft within Minecraft using redstone, and the only reason for _that_ is because he’s accomplished it already. Several months ago, in fact. To perfection. No, right now, Ace is pretty sure that he’s currently trying to reconstruct the entirety of Minecraft _within_ his redstone-Minecraft-reconstruction.

She’s also moderately certain that whenever he’s done with that (any day now), he’s going to take the recursion as far as it can go until the game collapses in on itself. Their Minecraft server is bigger on the inside. It’s ridiculous.

She goes out to the monstrosity of a reconstruction contraption and throws two stacks of string and all of her spare redstone at him.

“Ah, splendid.”

“The gunpowder is _mine,_ though,” she adds.

“Oh, I would never dream of claiming otherwise.”

They work around each other for a while, going back and forth between the house and other various menial projects. The blocky fake sun goes up, then down, then up again. There’s something really soothing about doing inane, meaningless tasks in a video game that will have absolutely no impact on her real life whatsoever. Except if she decides to push the Doctor into a ravine or something, in which case he’ll take very serious real-world revenge in the form of playing the spoons loudly outside of her room at three in the morning. This has happened before, and will probably happen again.

It’s calm and pleasant and lovely and the entire time there’s something like pressure, building up not-quite in her ears and not-quite in her brain. Maybe it’s in her chest. The discomfort swells. She kind of wants to cry, but it wouldn’t feel right if she did anyway.

“All right,” she says, suddenly.

The Professor looks up from where he’s been placing ludicrous amounts of scaffolding down in preparation for whatever massive construction project he’s going to work on next. “All right?” he echoes, sounding faintly confused.

“All right,” she repeats. “I know you’re wondering what happened with my mum tonight, so... this is me telling you.”

She stops.

“You really don’t need to,” he says softly.

She shrugs. Her chest feels tight. Strange. Weird. “We were arguing about my...” She swallows. “My dad.” There’s a beat of silence that threatens to swallow her, and she feels obliged to clarify, for no reason that she can think of, “my biological dad, you know. I... god, I don’t even know how it started. It feels like I just landed in the middle of the screaming match, you know? Without any actual, like, _buildup_ to the argument. I blinked, and.” She shudders. “There I was. Going ballistic at my mum. You know how I get.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

She almost scoffs, and turns left to try to skirt around a particularly forbidding and unscalable-looking mountain. “Oh, come off it, I’ve screamed at you enough times, you _do_ know what I mean. You know, when I – I get caught up in whatever it is I’m saying, I don’t know when to stop, I just keep on pushing and pushing and _pushing_ until she snaps, and – ”

She has to stop to take a deep breath, because she suddenly feels very, _very_ shaky. She stares at the screen. Acacia forest. She needs spare wood.

“I shouldn’t have pushed her,” she finishes, softer now. She keeps staring at the screen. “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t – hadn’t insulted her, hadn’t – ”

“Ace,” says the Professor, and it’s so gentle and careful that she feels her entire body tense up in preparation for – for something. She’s not sure. “Ace, it’s not your fault.”

“I shouldn’t be provoking her. I know what’s going to happen, every time I do it, but I just can’t stop myself, and – it’s stupid! I’m stupid!” She grabs the side of her head, scrunching up her fingers in her hair as tight as she can, and tugs, furiously upset with herself. “You’re going to tell me that I should stop blaming myself or whatever, but it’s not blaming myself if it’s _true._ If I hadn’t asked her – hadn’t called her a, a bitch and an emotionally-stunted wreck – _I’m_ the emotionally-stunted wreck here, why did I even – ”

“ _Categorically_ untrue.” And now it’s less gentle and more urgent. “If you believe that – ”

She growls, furious with herself, and flips the laptop screen closed sharply. She hates how patient he’s being with her. She almost wishes he’d just snap like her mum had, and start yelling furiously already. She knows he’s capable of it. _That,_ she’d know how to deal with. “Look,” she says, biting back complete rage. “If I was messing around with volatile chemicals in the lab, and found – I don’t know, a way to mix them that caused a _massive_ dangerous explosion, by accident – you’d tell me not to do that again, right?”

There’s a short silence, and then the Professor sets his own computer aside, very carefully, and turns to face her. “Of course,” he says, with an expression that reads _I know where this is going and I don’t like it_ all over his face.

“Right, so if I went and mixed them up like that again – ”

“I’d assume that you’d had good reason to do so,” he interrupts. “Or had forgotten the past results, or otherwise caused the same reaction through accidental means.”

She glares at him. “No. None of those things. If I went and mixed those chemicals again, like that, completely on purpose, what would you think?”

A long moment passes.

“I’d be worried, of course.”

“You’d tell me I was being an idiot, is what you’d do.”

“Have I ever called you that before?” His gaze is very serious. Piercing. She hates it when he looks at her like this, like she’s making some kind of terrible mistake he wants her to realize the gravity of before it’s too late.

“Isn’t that the definition of being an idiot?” she mutters, staring at the wall. “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a new result from it?”

“No,” he replies, quite firmly. “It’s logical. It’s reasonable, even. You’re not mixing chemicals for the purpose of injuring yourself, Ace. You’re throwing yourself at an experiment over and over in the hope that you’ll manipulate the variables enough to obtain a new result.”

“I’m not going to,” she says. The wall is extremely fascinating. The paint near the ceiling is just on the brink of peeling off. Wow. What a wall. “I _know_ I’m not going to get a different result. I should give up. Write up my findings. Call it a day. Get rejected by the college thesis board for a shitty lab report or whatever.” 

“Ace – ”

“I _know,_ all right?” Her fingernails dig into her closed palms. “I know I’m being stupid. Unreasonable. It’s – ”

“Please stop insulting my friend,” he says. His voice is quiet. “You’re being unnecessarily cruel to her, and it’s making me quite upset.”

This, of all things, is what brings her to a screeching halt, because. Oh.

Oh.

She ducks her head. “Right. Sorry. I’ll – I’ll stop.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s just...” She sighs, grimaces, tries to put it into words. “I don’t know. At this point, I’m pretty sure there’s only one thing worse than not getting to know my dad properly, and that’s knowing that, even if I _had_ got to know him, I’d’ve fucking hated him.”

He’s quiet. Very quiet. So much so that she begins to tense up again without really thinking noticing it. Shouting is bad. Long silences are worse.

“If you had known your father,” he says, and then stops. Like he isn’t sure what to say. Which is horrible in itself, because the Professor _always_ knows what to say. She’s fucked up his unshakeable outer shell with her screwed-up family problems. Good going, Ace.

“If I’d known him, I’d probably want him gone,” Ace says. “Because he’d’ve sucked. Just like my mum does.” She chokes back the guilt that wells up from her just _saying_ that. She doesn’t need to feel guilty about that, she _doesn’t._ It’s true. It’s probably true.

To her surprise, he shakes his head. “That’s not quite what I was going to ask. But now the actual question seems, ah, insensitive.”

She laughs. It sounds dead, even to her own ears. “Insensitive’s fine. Go ahead.”

He nods, but still looks tentative. “If you’d known him – what would you have wanted him to be?”

...She doesn’t know what she expected. She also doesn’t know _why_ he’s asking, but...

“I dunno,” she says glumly. “I don’t _know_ what a good dad’s supposed to be like, Professor. I never even got the chance to know what a bad one was like. He was just... never there.”

“But in an ideal world,” he presses.

“Someone who... argues with my mum so she won’t take it out on me all the time? Actually shows up to parent-teacher interviews?” She shakes her head, knowing that neither of those things are right, and that she won’t be able to put into words what _is_. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

She opens up the laptop lid, and stares at the screen, where her avatar has been idling in the acacia forest for god knows how long. She can’t remember what she’d been doing.

“Thank you for sharing,” the Professor says, still very quiet and sounding not at all like his usual self. “It can’t have been easy for you.”

She snorts. “Yeah, well. Since when has anything been easy for me, right?”

He hums, a bit sadly. She stares at the screen and then somewhat mechanically starts to chop down trees. Somewhere in the distance of the game, she notices that he’s resumed building.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, after they’ve gone back to the game for a few minutes.

She thinks about this for a second or two.

“Sad,” she decides.

“I see.”

There’s a very long pause, and then an Ender Dragon spawns in the sky above their Minecraft house, entirely without warning.

“Oh my _god,_ ” says Ace, and covers her face with her hands as it begins to swoop and plough headfirst through blocks, blasting them cleanly into oblivion as it goes. “No – why would you – ”

“Chaos,” says the Doctor, straight-faced. He starts typing commands into the console again.

“Professor, you spent months on that thing – what are you _doing_ – ”

His keyboard goes clickety-clack. Three more dragons spawn in quick succession.

She’s desperately trying to hold back horror and what feels an awful lot like unrestrained laughter. “ _WHY._ ”

“Oh, would you look at that,” he say blandly. “I wonder how that happened. My goodness, it looks like another one just showed up.”

“Stop adding dragons,” she begs, “you’ve _got_ to stop adding dragons.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, and adds three more.

She ends up getting hit by a stray blast of dragon-fire, and respawns with a barely-muffled giggle, only for her screen to immediately fill up with even _more_ dragons. She promptly dies again, and again, and by the time she actually manages to get to the the edge of the dragon-infested warzone without immediately kicking the bucket, the Professor is serenely programming in the twenty-third dragon and literally everything they’ve worked on building for the last few months is an unrecognizable mess of razed blocks and scattered item drops. And dragons. It’s really hard to miss the dragons.

Twenty-three Ender Dragons is apparently too much for the server, however. After a _horrible_ amount of lag, and then a solid fifteen seconds of frozen screens (which is just _all dragons_ ) it decides that it’s had enough, and promptly crashes, sending them directly back to the title screen.

“Oops,” says the Professor, without a hint of shame.

Ace stares at her screen for a long moment. Then she falls backwards onto the couch, throws back her head, and just _howls_ with laughter. It’s not even that funny. It’s far past midnight on a school night, and here she is, hiding from her mother at her ex-physics teacher’s house and cackling over the fact that he’s just destroyed their dumb video game world with _dragons._

Her life is a mess, but there’s something really wonderful about this moment. This, here. Whatever _this_ is supposed to be.

After a few minutes, she calms down a bit. At some point, the laughter might have drifted into the vague direction of ‘hysterics’, but... she really is feeling a lot better. “...Thanks.”

“Any time,” comes the reply, slightly smug in the way that only the Doctor can be after emotionally manipulating her through the means of video game dragons.

“Please tell me you didn’t ruin our Minecraft server so I’d feel better,” Ace says seriously, sitting up. Destroying an entire Minecraft world just to make her laugh seems more than a little over the top. And also kind of hilarious in itself, but she’s sure it won’t be nearly as funny _tomorrow._ They’d spent ages on that thing.

He taps the side of his nose. “I saved a backup before I started. I’ll restore it later.”

“Good. I mean – yeah. Do that.”

“I’ll write myself a note.”

A moment passes.

“Ah!” He springs to his feet, energy incarnate. “Your jacket’s most likely finished drying by this point. I shall retrieve it for you.”

“Actually,” she says, and rubs her eyes. “I might go to bed? I think...” She hesitates. “I think I might be able to sleep now.”

He pauses, mid-step. The over-the-top energy drains away in the space of a split-second to something calmer, more sedate. “I’m glad. I’ll bring it up to your room, then.”

“Cheers,” she says.

She watches him go for a second or two. Then she shuts down the laptop properly, stands up, and carries it up the stairs with her, idly glancing at the many, many pictures and portraits hanging all along the wall. Abstract paintings, what appears to be either the actual Mona Lisa or at the least a very, very good replica; and photographs ranging from black-and-white to full color of people that she, for the most part, doesn’t recognize at all. Despite this being his house, the Professor’s barely in any of them. Although...

At the top of the stairs, she pauses and squints at a new-looking photograph, knolled neatly into a free perpendicular gap that several others have provided. She reaches out and flicks on the hallway light to get a better look, and – yeah, it’s exactly what she thought it was. Her and Hex messing around in the back yard of Allen Road last winter, making some kind of weird snow-creature when they had been supposed to be working on an English assignment about Lovecraft or something. They’d stolen the Doctor’s umbrella and done some sort of half-baked summoning circle for a laugh.

In the photo, she’s shoving a fistful of snow down the back of Hex’s shirt while he yelps and tries to push her away, cursing spectacularly. She hadn’t even realized the Professor had taken a photo. She wonders when he’d put the photo up.

It’s a nice picture, though. She gives it one last glance, turns the light off, and continues down the hallway to her room. And it really is _her_ room, even though it feels well weird to have a second bedroom, one that isn’t in the house where she legally lives with her mother.

There’s so many spare rooms on Allen Road that when the Professor had offered one up to her, she hadn’t felt all that bad about accepting. There had already been a bed there, and they’d hauled in an old antique desk from the basement, and then she’d ended up pinning some posters and polaroid photographs to the walls, and bringing over a rug she’d found at some garage sale or other. The Professor doesn’t mess with her setup or move things around, not like her mum does, so she’s taken to bringing homework and books and personal stuff over here too.

She doesn’t sleep over all that much, because Mum tends to get angry about her staying out late, but it sure as hell feels a lot more like home than actual home does.

She pushes open the door and elbows the lights switch on; makes her way across the piles of discarded clothes and books and god-knows-what-else to place the laptop on the desk, and pauses for a moment as she looks around.

The chipped, rusty guitar that Hex likes to mess around with on whenever he’s over here leans against the wall, where he’d left it a few days ago. One of Mel’s flannel scarves lies in a haphazard brightly-colored pile near the closet. Ace’s eyes travel over a faint dent on the wall where Raine had shoulder-checked it while attempting to teach her to fence indoors. Propped up on the headboard of the bed is the boombox that the Professor had made for her; actually made, from scratch with spare parts and soldering and everything. 

“Huh,” she says out loud.

There’s a tiny pile of patches and pins on the desk that she doesn’t recognize, and next to them is a note in messy but perfectly legible handwriting that she _does_ recognize. She goes to look at them. They’re mostly all black-and-white, with various anti-capitalistic and ‘fuck the police’ sentiments picked out in stark, eye-catching designs. The patches are fuzzy and ragged at the edges, like they’d been carefully cut off the fabric they were originally attached to. They look pretty old, actually. Vintage-old.

Benny’s note says, _Fun fact, I used to be in a punk rock band. Found some of my old stuff while packing this weekend; you’re the most punk person I know. Hope you like them! See you when I get back. xoxxx_

The Professor finds her ten minutes later, half-slumped at the desk while trying very hard not to cry about a bunch of _stupid_ _fucking_ patches. Which is pretty much as embarrassing as it sounds.

He drops the pile of sheets and blankets he’s holding, and starts doing that thing where he panics about humans having emotions and him not knowing how to deal with that.

“I’m not crying,” she says angrily, wiping her eyes. “Stop the – stop it. I’m not crying. I’m fine. This is fine.”

“Of course it is,” he says bracingly, and presumably starts waiting for her to tell the truth.

She blows her nose into her sleeve. Eugh. “Stop looking at me like that. I’m fine.”

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t have emotions. I’ve never had an emotion in my life.”

“Mhm.”

Silence.

“....I think people might actually love me, and I don’t know what to do about it,” she says unhappily.

“Oh, Ace,” he says, and hugs her. It’s one of his really good hugs, too; gentle but firm, the kind that she thinks he might have designed and plotted and planned out just for her. Even though that’s stupid and impossible. “Of course people love you. How could we not?”

“I can think of a lot of reasons,” she mutters into his shoulder.

“But I can’t think of a single one.” He pats her on the back, and waits until she draws back out of the hug before he says, “Here. I’ll help you make your bed.”

He does, and very politely ignores the fact that she keeps blowing her nose and cursing to herself the whole time. He’s cool like that. The fresh sheets smell really nice, at least.

When they’re done, he steps back to the doorway and looks over at her. “If you need anything – ”

“I’ll scream like I’m being stabbed,” she assures him.

“...Please don’t do that,” he says, side of his mouth quirking upwards just a bit. “But don’t hesitate to bother me. It’s absolutely no problem at all.”

“Okay,” she says, even though she’s _definitely_ not going to bother him for any reason, not after literally everything she’s put him through tonight. “Thanks. Um, goodnight.”

He smiles at her and departs, leaving her to stare at the pile of patches still heaped up on her desk.

Her phone’s in her jacket pocket. It’s fully charged – which means the Professor must have plugged it in for her at some point, even though she can’t for the life of her remember when he’d done it.

After a moment, she comes to a decision, and texts Benny.

_thx for the punk stuff. gonna add them to my jacket tomorrow_

Benny must be pulling a pretty boring all-nighter at whatever dig site she’s working at tonight, because the response is nearly instantaneous.

_Hah, glad you like them! It’s been a while since I touched any of it, so it’s good to see it all going to a good home. Might have a corset or two somewhere if that’s your sort of thing? (It was NOT mine.) And jewellery. Spiky jewellery. Seriously, what was up with all that spiky jewellery?_

_no clue but it all sounds well wicked_

She hesitates for a moment, then adds –

_now i want to know about your band tho_

_no._

_come on_

**_No._ **

_you legally need to tell me about your punk rock band bernice summerfield don’t make me blackmail you_

_That’s a big fat nope from me. No more details. None. I was in a punk rock band in college and that’s all you need to know about it_

_please i need to know. is this music on the internet. can i find your shitty myspace page somewhere. do you have a very small but dedicated group of fans who hold out hope for your revival. p l ease benny please please please_

_No no no and no._

_bennyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy_

_It’s past midnight, kiddo. Go to sleep before I tell the Doctor you’re still up and he guilt trips you into going to bed. xxxx_

The smile fades off Ace’s face, and she slowly puts her phone down.

There’s got to be some sort of limit to the number of emotions one person can feel within a short space of time, she thinks. There probably is, because she’s pretty sure that she’s hit the Emotion Limit and clipped straight into ‘complete blankness’ once again. Or maybe ‘complete blankness’ is a secret bonus emotion that she’s only just unlocked as a prize for speedrunning the rest of them.

Ick. She doesn’t want to think about any of this any more.

*

She changes into something a bit more bed-appropriate, does all the usual getting-ready-for-bed nonsense, and then she actually does close the shades and turn the lights off and get into bed for real.

She’s exhausted, but for some reason it doesn’t feel right to go to sleep. So she just lies there in the dark, staring at the opposite wall. _It’s not safe to sleep, there are monsters nearby,_ she thinks, and then laughs.

It’s stupid, because actual monsters aren’t real. All there is are really, really shitty humans. And if there _were_ monsters, real and horrible and dreadful in all the ways that real monsters are, she and the Professor would probably be able to scare them away by just being worse. 

Nonetheless, despite her earlier claim that she’d be able to go to sleep, it just isn’t happening. Because her stupid brain won’t shut up and won’t shut off. She’s done _so many things wrong today._

The door creaks open.

“Gonna tell me a bedtime story?” she asks the wall.

He laughs – she can hear the gentle little huff of amusement from the doorway that he’s standing in. “Do you want me to tell you a bedtime story?” he asks, half-teasing.

She bundles up the pillow under her head, and hesitates for a moment, before saying, a lot quieter than she’d expected to, “...Kind of. Yeah.”

Silence, and then, softly, “All right.” Footsteps. “I’m turning off the light now,” he tells her, and he does, and then he pulls the chair out from her desk and sits down on it. “Any preferences?”

She can’t. “I... don’t know. I can’t think of anything.”

“That’s perfectly fine.”

“I can’t think of _anything_.” Ace feels compelled to clarify. “I’m just – sad. And angry, I think. Still angry. It doesn’t feel like I should be, but...”

“You’re allowed to feel angry,” he tells her. “You’re allowed to feel anything you want.”

She stares at the wall, grey and grainy in the darkness. “Ha. Sure.”

“I’m entirely serious. Anyone who says otherwise is attempting to control something that they have no rights to.”

She shifts, really not wanting to have this conversation like _this._ Or, like, at all. She’s already had enough emotional confrontations tonight. She’s completely wrung out, and just the thought of having more serious conversations about her emotions and problems is making her feel faintly sick. “...Look, are you going to tell me a story or not.”

He’s silent, and then he sighs, and when he speaks next, there’s a soft sad fondness to it.

“All right,” he says. “One bedtime story, coming right up. Kindly hold your applause to the end.”

“I’ll try to restrain myself,” she says dryly.

He spins a story; a wild story about a world where being sad is illegal and happiness is strewn all over the place in bright neon colors with splashed-over tinges of misery. It’s kind of sad and kind of horrible, but also fantastic in all the right ways. He weaves the two of them into it deftly, humming snatches of blues and matching her vocal inflections and turns of phrase so neatly that she can hardly believe that none of it ever happened.

She thinks that in any other circumstances she’d be making fun of him for being corny about it and throwing in frankly insane details like the man made entirely of candy and the childish, simple names of literally _all_ of the characters – but the heavyhandedness of it all is almost reassuring. It settles around her like a warm woollen blanket, and by the time he’s saying, “And it’s not that they lived happily ever after, because that would rather defeat the whole point, but they lived quite humanly ever after nonetheless and that’s all we can hope for,” she’s already half-asleep.

The room falls beautifully quiet. She stirs briefly as she feels the covers shift around her ever-so-slightly.

“You don’t _need_ to tuck me in,” she points out, blinking up at him.

“I know,” he says, and finishes doing it anyway. “Sleep well, Ace.”

“Mmph,” she says, and allows herself to be enveloped in warm heaviness. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all we can ever hope for.” He tucks her in and pauses. “Sleep in as long as you want. I’ll forge a doctor’s note.”

“Thought you _were_ a doctor.”

“Only when it’s comedically appropriate. Hush now.” Cool lips brush over her forehead. “Goodnight.”

“G’night, Professor,” she murmurs, and then she’s gone.

*

*

When she wakes up the next morning, he makes her pancakes. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> in the shared Minecraft world with everyone else in it, Ace has a stick that the Doctor enchanted with ridiculous amounts of Knockback and damage-dealing. she calls it her baseball bat and she pulls it out whenever some serious Minecraft Drama is about to go down
> 
> thank you for stopping by. have a good night, everybody.


End file.
